I later found a NYT piece from 2002 which contained an actual rumour about the “iPhone”, including the name:

industry analysts see evidence that Apple is contemplating what inside the company is being called an ”iPhone.”

This, I think, would qualify as a rumour in most people’s definitions, though it didn’t include “leaked prototypes”.

But back to this Davidson piece, which might have been more insightful than the NYT’s one or even Beattie’s…

In hindsight, Davidson’s piece was both prescient of what would actually happen and telling in what didn’t happen. He talked about satellite radio, Plays for Sure, and WiMAX none of which panned out as planned. Also, Davidson surmised some things about Apple’s “content play” which were both less ambitious and more impactful (on Apple’s bottomline) than what actually happened. Apple’s 2007 move against DRM might have been surprising to the 2005 Davidson. And it’s funny to think back to an era when high prices for flash storage made it prohibitive to build a mobile device…

Basically, though, Davidson was speculating about an integrated device which would replace several devices at once:

[We could argue about Android’s NFC play being closer to the digital wallet ideal than Apple’s passbook. The other parts are closer to a Treo anyway…]

In the abstract at least (and in Steve Jobs’s way of describing it), the iPhone has been this integrated communicating device about which people had been talking for years. So, kudos to Mike Davidson for predicting this a while in advance. He was neither the first nor the last, but he painted an interesting portrait.

Now, there are other parts to this story, I think. Given the fact that work on what would become iOS devices (iPad first, we’re told) hadn’t begun when Charles Wolf told the New York Times about a device called “iPhone” internally at Apple, I get the impression that the rumours predated much of the actual development work leading to the device. Speculation happened later still. It seems to relate to a number of things demonstrated by STS generally and SCOT specifically. Namely that technological development is embedded in a broader social process.

I also find interesting some side notions in all of these pieces. For instance, ideas about the impact the device might have on people’s usage. Or the fact that the move from the Treo to the iPhone ends up being quite significant, in retrospect. Even Davidson’s points about headphones and retail stores seem to relate to current things. So does the existence of the iPod touch and Apple TV in Apple’s lineup, addressing Mayfield and Cringely, respectively.

I also end up reflecting upon the shift from the “digital hub” strategy (peaking around 2007 or so) to the one revealed with iCloud, “Back to the Mac” and, yes, even Apple Maps. Dediu devotes much time to his mentor Clay Christensen’s notion of “disruptive innovation” and spent part of this latest Critcal Path episode talking about the risks behind Apple not being disruptive enough.

The latest episode of Télé-Québec’s Les Francs Tireurs had a segment on international humatarian aid. (Especially of the Euro-American CICR and Reporters sans frontières style.) Maybe there are more (I don’t to watch much television) but this one was the first television report which had a thoughtful and insightful discussion of the negative impacts of humanitarian aid.

Of course, several parts of the discussion were probably edited out (hosts on the show are sometimes explicit about the “need” for editing) and it did sound at times like discussions that most anthropology students have had at one point or another (usually pretty early on in their training) but it was quite refreshing, especially when compared to the usual news reports on how bad the situation is supposed to be anywhere else in the world (i.e., any place where people live a different lifestyle).

What’s funny is that the two main participants in the show were quite honest about the biases of Quebec society in terms of humanitarian aid. This is a society (my own upbringing) in which people pride themselves to be “open-minded” (often meaning “more open-minded that you“). Yet people take humanitarian aid as a sacred principle, not to be criticised. Some aid workers in Africa and elsewhere seem to think that their mission (the religious connotations were discussed on the television show) is to help Others become more like them. Pretty charitable when you see your own habits as the only appropriate way to live, but pretty damaging when you transform knowledgeable human beings into the object of pity.